Millions To Lose Safety Net Benefits As Trump Redefines Poverty

The Trump administration has been working on a plan to redefine the word “poverty” and to chance the way that those numbers are counted. This is so they can cut benefits to millions of people, and now these cuts are just on the horizon. Millions of people, including infants, will lose their food stamp, unemployment benefits, and Medicaid coverage thanks to this decision. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains what’s happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

A few weeks ago, we talked about the fact that the Trump administration is actually trying to redefine who is living in poverty here in the United States. They want to be able to kick people off their benefits, say that our poverty numbers are decreasing but not by helping people, by making them make more money, but by just changing a how we count people who are in poverty. Part of that involves you know, inflation and chained CPI. I explained it all in the previous video if you want to go back and check that out. But here's the thing, the uh, center for budget and policy priorities. So a liberal think tank when ahead and crunched the numbers on how many people would be effected if the Trump administration is successful, which it appears they likely will be in changing who is counted as living below the federal poverty line. And here is the list of what's going to happen in this country.

If they changed this definition, more than 250,000 adults would lose health insurance through Medicaid, more than 300,000 children and some pregnant women would lose health insurance through the CHIP program. Millions of people would receive fewer subsidies for purchasing health insurance on the Obamacare marketplace, making it too expensive for them to afford anymore more than 250,000 seniors and people with disabilities would lose or receive less access to the Medicare Part d subsidy program, forcing them to pay more for prescription drugs, more than 150,000 seniors and people with disabilities with lose premium assistance for Medicare part B, meaning they'd have to pay over $1,500 to see a doctor, uh, nearly 200,000 people would lose food stamp benefits. More than 100,000 students would become ineligible for free or reduced price lunches. And more than a 100,000 extra would lose free meals. And about 40,000 infants and young children would lose access to care such as breast feeding support and healthy food through the special supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children.

And that's just a start folks. That's what would happen when you add up all the numbers to millions of people in this country. If this administration does the sinister move of simply changing the definition of who lives in poverty and the only reason they would want to change this definition is to boast about their numbers because suddenly if they change it, and these people who are in poverty are no longer considered to be living in poverty, Trump gets to come out and say, hey, we just reduce the poverty in this country by 10% overnight. Quite literally aren't I the best? I'm so great and wonderful. Everybody should vote for me in 2020 because no other president's been able to do that. Yeah, because no other president was stupid enough and heartless enough to do that. But this also goes along with the long held Republican belief of let's cut all the benefits.

Let's kill social safety net programs. You know, force women to have babies. But if there are too poor to be able to afford any kind of a prenatal care or post birth care, oh well that's your fault. Too Bad.

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